William Carlos Williams seldom wrote anything in regular meters (except for his juvenilia), but to convey the rhythm of the dancers in the famous painting by Breughel, he wrote in amphibrachic trimeters. The unstressed syllables of adjacent amphibrachs ( * / *) result in a triple meter that has much in common with the anapest, but Williams's pattern is quite consistent at the start of this poem, slipping into dactyls some lines further on:

                 *    /      *   |      *   /   *  |  *       /     *
                In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,

                   *   /    *   | *    /         *  |  *     /       *
                the dancers go round, they go round and
                around, the squeal and the blare and the
                tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles